1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to the field of computers, and in particular to data management in a computer system. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to pre-retrieving and pre-caching data for a call center.
2. Description of the Related Art
To provide service and support to customers, businesses today often rely on centralized service centers, which are often shared with other businesses and/or with other departments within a single enterprise. The service center includes a data center, in which calls are initially received and triaged, and the destination service desk (which may be staffed by an employee of either the enterprise that has contracted for service with the data center or a Third Party Administrator (TPA) under contract with either the data center or the enterprise). Thus, a call from a customer to the enterprise, which is usually made to a toll-free number, is initially received at the data center, and then routed to an appropriate agent in an appropriate enterprise/department/TPA.
Since the data center is often shared among multiple enterprises or departments within an enterprise, business data for these multiple entities can seldom be retrieved optimally, particularly when the call is to a data center that uses an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application and Screen-Pops. The IVR application is a voice recognition system that, based on spoken responses to prepared questions from the IVR application, routes the call to the appropriate agent in the appropriate enterprise/department. (Alternatively, information responses may be input by a caller on a telephone keypad where the data center is a Dual tone Modulated Frequency (DTMF) based system.) The Screen-Pops are pop-up windows that are populated with data needed by the agent, such as the caller's name, business history, account history, personal or security data, etc. In general, IVR applications reside within the data center, and calls being treated by the IVR application have to wait several seconds before business data can be retrieved and the call can be routed to an appropriate agent with a populated Screen-Pop. The wait period is exacerbated by data legacy systems, which often take a long time to access. Holding the call at the data center ties up an IVR port at the data center for several seconds, and therefore is extremely expensive (in terms of resource usage). Furthermore, such delays cause customer dissatisfaction. Thus, a main objective of the data center is to pass the call on to the appropriate agent, with the needed customer data, as soon as possible.